SAMSARA (2016)
Instrumentation: string quartet
This piece is made of circles. It’s always promising when you hit upon an idea that can be described so succinctly.
My first piano teacher, John Hursey, gave me a copy of a very mysterious piece of music that fits on to a single side of paper. Titled Resonances, though research seems to show no documented record of it being published under this title, it features some wonderful atonal harmony that I later learned was the product of composer Josef Hauer’s personal and rival-to-Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic compositional method.
Partly because Hauer has an air of underdog-ness about him, partly because he has been relegated to footnote in twentieth century musical history and I sensed that uncovering something ‘forgotten’ would be good for my degree marks, and partly because the ‘circular’ nature of his techniques served the aims of an idea I had, I latched on to him and tried to gain a hasty working familiarity with his methods. Both his compositions and his writing have an air of mysticism around them: he was not merely a composer, but ‘the spiritual father and (in spite of many imitators!) still the only master and connoisseur of twelve-note music’; did not ‘compose’, as such, but rather was the architect of zwölftonspiel which offer nothing short of ‘the deepest insight into cosmic order’ (source). These lofty aims yield a suitably mysterious music.
As many a young Westerner before me, I had a tussle with Buddhism in my late teens and some of the ideas I picked up there found their way into my musical pursuits. I'll avoid attempting to define samsara here for a long list of sensible reasons, but from it I got the idea of thinking of things as ‘circular’. You see where I'm going. The challenge that spawned this piece was to work circles into as many aspects of a composition as possible.
Hauer’s compositional method is harmonically circular, we’ve established that. Below is my kontinuum (Hauer's term), which importantly ends where it started and therefore can be repeated (if the process were continued, the D in the final chord would be replaced by C, which would create the starting chord. It’s not very clear as I've re-spelled the F# as Gb).
